


Loss Ficlet: Blade of Grass

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (Ficlets) [29]
Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 02:10:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15402660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: I wrote this an absolute age ago, but just realized I never posted to AO3.  Here you go!





	Loss Ficlet: Blade of Grass

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this an absolute age ago, but just realized I never posted to AO3. Here you go!

##  **Blade of Grass  
 July 2016**

At half-past one on a Friday afternoon I was woken by the most ear-splitting racket imaginable.  I had the day off of work and I rolled over slowly, knocking all manner of things off of my nightstand as I pawed for the vibrating, screeching phone.  I had gotten off work at ten a.m. and had just calmed down to go to sleep. Whoever had deigned to call was going to get an earful.

“ _What_?” I snapped, making my voice as sharp as possible given the sleepiness threatening to drag me under.

 _Silence_ , only heavy breathing.  Disgusted, I glanced down at the screen.  

 _Jamie_.

My heart raced as I sat up, rubbing sleep out of my eyes.

Voice softening, fully awake, and trying not to panic, I said, “Jamie, what’s wrong?”

He was quiet ––  

one beat ­––

two beats ––

three beats –––

And then: “My Da.”  

The pattern of his breathing was irregular over an otherwise silent void.

“He’s… gone. Last night he… and then this morning, it was…”

I had known before he told me, but it took my breath away when he said it anyway.

“…over.”

His words were flat. As if by saying it, the event that he had not dared to consider in reality was true.

“Jamie.”

 _Silence_.

My veins hummed with adrenaline as potent as a slap across the face. I had no idea what to say or how to comfort him. The rehearsed and practiced phrases I learned in medical school felt wrong and the clinical way my brain worked through these things ( _understanding the science and then the emotion_ ) was eminently unhelpful.

“I am so, _so_ sorry. Are you… okay?”

“I found him. I just stared.  I couldna do anythin’ Claire. Jenny, she… she was the one to call an ambulance.”

“ _Jamie_ ,” I breathed.

 _Was his name the best that I ha_ d? _How many times would I say it?_

“How can I help?”

“There’s no’ anythin’ ye can do.  I jus’… needed to hear yer voice, s’all.“

The sound from the base of his throat was his and his alone. But his affect was all wrong –– _the very essence of Jamie was gone_.

“I’m off of work. Let me come be with you.”  

Just barely beneath the surface was: _I am worried about you_.  

With a grimace, I rambled off a laundry list of ways I could be helpful: “I can be there in a few hours and help with… _whatever_. Distract your niece and nephew, clean, run errands, make calls, sit silently in a corner.”

“No. It’s no’ necessary, Sass––”

silence, a breath and a few heartbeats before he concluded ––

“––dinna fash yerself wi’ it. I’ll manage.  Jus’ needed to tell ye I willna be ‘round this evenin’… or this weekend.”

My fingers covered my mouth, holding unsaid words inside. My heart was a thunderous beast in my chest, a muscled stampeding thing that needed to satisfy a selfish urge to comfort him.

“I need to get goin’ now, Claire. I’ll call ye––”

Dropping to my lap, my hand allowed my treacherous mouth to interrupt.  “Jamie. Wait.”

“Aye?”

“I love you, alright?”

It had been less than seven days since I said it for the first time –– in his bed, hearing the story of the scar on his thigh, the war in Afghanistan.  It had come easy then and was even easier now.

He was quiet.

“Ditto, lass.  I’ll call ye… maybe later on this evenin’.”

With my legs curled up to my chest and back against the headboard, I thought for a long while.  

I was an orphan, sure, but I had no idea what it was like to actually _know_ the pain. I had forgotten years and years earlier, until my parents were hardly even memories. The ache of loss for my parents was an abstraction, a dull knife incapable of causing much damage.  

Jamie, though, had almost three decades with Brian Fraser. He had a clear image of him. A father.  An archetype of the type of _man_ he wanted to be.  A figure he had said he wanted me to meet.

_Now I never would._

I stood in the center of my room dumbly in my underwear, hands in fists at my side, feeling helpless for a solid three minutes. He said “no” to me coming to Broch Mordha. I had no clue what I would do when I arrived, but I could not well enough stay in my flat.

I packed haphazardly, feeling blindly at the back of my closet for the scratchy black dress I wore to my Uncle Lamb’s funerals and a pair of boring black heels.

Clicking my tongue, I glanced around the room for the other things I needed.  

Jamie’s watch was on the nightstand –– resting on top of the book we were reading. The watch was unclasped next to his half-empty ( _half-full_ ) glass of water from a few nights before.  I ran my finger along the rim of the glass and looked at the back of the watch.  

 _You are a braw lad. Love, Da._  

When I slipped it over my hand, I felt it tick gently against my wrist, the metal almost cold on my flesh. Hairs on arms at attention, I stared for a long moment at the face of the watch.

Then the realization hit.

_I_ _was crying. For Jamie. For Brian Fraser and Jenny Murray and her darling, growing brood who I had only barely met._

Needing something to do with my hands, I busied them in my hair, twisting and knotting until the curls submitted to a fishtail braid over my shoulder.

Then hammered out text message: _Please tell me if you change your mind. I am here for you whenever you decide you need me._

I hit send and then read and re-read the message, analyzing each word, trying to decide if he could read it as a deception when I showed up.  

Biting down on my lip, I slipped into fresh knickers and a pair of yoga pants. Jamie was hurting and I knew that I would feel as helpless _there_ as I did here, but perhaps the nearness would be a sort of balm to him.

The sky was vanilla the entire way to Lallybroch –– the kind of endless stretch of atmosphere that is neither cloudy nor cloudless, but is just creamy as far as the eye can see.  

Broch Mordha was easy enough to find and I made it into town shortly before dinnertime. After checking into a small hotel I situated, I decided to try again.

My pointer finger hovered over the screen before typing: _Thinking of you_.

Shaking my head, I deleted it and then retyped the same thing.

I read the message out loud before hitting send: _Thinking of you. This cannot be easy.  I don’t want to smother you, but I want you to know I am here. You don’t need the burden of managing me, but please let me know if you’re okay._

“He’s not okay,” I muttered to myself, deleting the last clause.  He would be lying if he had said he was “okay.”  It was an emotional state not even available to him on the continuum.  

I may not have remembered how the loss felt, but I was sure enough of that.

I added: _but please let me know if you need to talk._

Hesitating, I typed: _xx._

I was halfway invested into a trashy afternoon talk show ( _DNA tests, unknown fathers, lots of calling men “pricks” and women ungodly things_ ) and waiting for pizza when there was a knock at the door. A firm double tap.  I rose, gathering money.

Behind the door Jamie stood with his arm above his head and hand clutching the door frame.  He was looking at his shoes and only glanced up at me.

I stared at him dumbly, fist clutching a stack of bills.

“I ordered pizza, I… I…”

“S’cute,” he said a little blandly, dropping his hand and reaching for the tail poking at the end of my braid.  When he stepped past me he smelled like pine, old books, and Sunday church service.

“How did you… I didn’t…”  I walked haltingly towards him, stuffing the money into my back pocket.  At the window, he looked into the infinite gray drizzle stretching well beyond the pop of a green hill behind the hotel.

“Ye think this town’s large enough that I dinna ken when ye’re in it, Sassenach?” His tone had a manufactured lightness that did not color his expression.  His lips curled slightly at the corners before falling.

“I suppose not,” I sighed, fighting the urge to go all the way, to wind around his waist and press my face along the column of his spine.

“I told ye no’ to come.”  

All of my plans to insinuate myself into the situation had been unwritten now that he was in front of me.  “I’m sorry, I––”

“ _Thank you_ ,” he breathed, finally turning. His eyes were red and the rise of his cheek was smeared with a gloss of tears.  

“Of course,” I whispered, closing the distance. Against his chest with my cheek above his heart, I slipped my fingers under his shirt to rest along the puckered flesh at his beltline.  

It was the same body I knew intimately ––the sharp jut of bones under lean planes of muscle, the peach fuzz at the curve of his lower back, the solid power of a body that was somehow hard where I was soft and infinitely inviting. But it was different now –– skin rippling into gooseflesh at my touch and _trembling_.

A large hand closed over my shoulder.

“ _Mo nighean donn._ ”

And that is when he broke, not with tears but a snuffling sigh rising from his belly.

“I owe ye a walk, lass,” he said eventually, pulling back.  There was gravel in his voice and his eyes were red. “But would ye mind letting me crash yer pizza party first?”

I craned my neck to rest my chin on his shoulder.  “I ordered green peppers.  You’ll get heartburn.”

“Mmm. I can pick them off.”

“Then you have a deal.”

We ate with the television on, Jamie smirking as he discarded green peppers. Afterwards, he made good on his promise to take me for a walk. We stopped in a park outside of a school that he said was his, where he played sports and dated girls, lost his virginity and smoked his first ( _and only_ ) cigarette.  I nestled against him when he said “ _c’mere_ ” and snaked my arm over his knee.  

He was unnervingly silent. I was not sure _what_ I had expected out of him, knowing that to have _any_ expectations was profoundly unfair, but I had not expected _this_.

A stillness, but for his quiet tracing over my skin.  

A silence, but for his breathing.  

 _This stoicism_.  

“Jamie?”

He made a muffled “mmmph” noise, his lips in my hair, breath warm against my scalp.  It lingered, garlicky, between us.

“Don’t feel like you have to, but you can _talk_ to me.”

Another noise. His fingers ceased their work before his palm cupped my shoulder and skated down.

The sensation was barely there, almost a daydream when I closed my eyes.

“I thought what happened to me in Afghanistan was the worst day of my life.”

He linked our hands and he raised them between us. His eyes fixed on the seam of them for a long moment.  When he let his hand go limp, I kept our tangle of fingers suspended.

Entire worlds shattered when he brought his eyes to mine and said, “Then I thought yesterday was the worst day of my life.”

His eyes fell and fixed on the diamond pendent at the dip of my throat.

“I was wrong, Claire.  Today was the worst day of my life.”

When I started to speak, he rose and walked three steps ahead of me the entire way back to the hotel.

The wake was early the next evening.  

Standing in a line of mourners, repeatedly ducking the question of how I knew the deceased ( _“Jamie’s girlfriend, but never met Brian” did not have much of a ring to it_ ), I fidgeted in my black funeral dress and funeral shoes, catching Jamie staring at me over the shoulders of the people ahead of me in the queue.

His gaze was ten thousand miles away.

When I made it to the front, he embraced me with such a force that it almost took my breath away. Burying his mouth in my hair, I had the sudden and unshakable feeling that he was foraging for _something_ there.  I ached that all he would find was a tangle of shower-damp curls.

His breath fluttered against my scalp in small gasps –– hot and humid, sticky and sober.

“Christ, Claire.” His voice was the breathy excavation of a tender wound. “These people. They _loved_ him. _I_ loved him.”

I needed him to believe every word that I whispered –– _I am here for you, I love you, I am so sorry, I am not sure what to say_.

My words sounded familiar. They were probably uttered to me as I clung to my Uncle Lamb.  Now, they sounded insignificant to my ears –– _they_ _were_ _not enough as I strove to give him an impossible comfort_.

Despite his sister’s heavy sigh, Jamie’s embrace was unhurried and he drew me even closer, the lines of his shoulders relaxing.

“Jamie, c’mon.”  Jenny’s voice was a somber alto. It was the rasp of someone who had shed uncountable tears behind closed doors.  

At this, his hands slipped to my hips. “Sit wi’ me?”

I tossed a nervous glance at Jenny who was not looking at her brother, but at me. I offered a weak nod.  I barely knew her and the way she was looking at me said she was not sure of my presence.

He released me, slipping an arm around my shoulder.  

“ _Claire the Doctor_. Back again. Welcome to…” Her face contorted and then fell, glancing around the mahogany-paneled room dripping in flowers. “ _This_.  Pleasure to see ye.”

I gave my most awkward approximation of a smile and felt Jamie shuffle a little as I stepped forward as if to hug Jenny. 

I dropped back to his side, unshaken, and taking no small amount of comfort in the warmth radiating through his suit coat. Immediately, I felt bad and chastised myself: ‘ _this isn’t about you, Beauchamp_.’

Jamie led us to our seats and held my hand over his thigh the entire time. He sat stoic throughout. The priest spoke kind words about Brian Fraser and told stories about the Fraser kids. (“ _Nay a more difficult crew of hooligans could be found_.”) He spoke of Brian reuniting with God and Ellen in a way that made Jamie’s hand twitch in mine.

When the service was over, Jamie showed me the photo board –– Brian holding a baby with a perfectly cropped thatch of feathery red hair ( _Jamie_ ), Brian leading a horse with a small version of Jamie ( _pre-muscled, missing teeth, gangly long legs_ ), Brian with his arms around a striking woman with red hair piled on top of her head and a beautiful tusk bracelet at her wrist ( _Ellen_ ). ****

“ _Let’s go_ ,” he whispered eventually, fingers lingering on a photo of his father with his arms around a twenty-something Jamie in fatigues, both grinning.   _Pre-war, pre-illness_.

Afterwards, standing against my car in the parking lot, he silently tended to my hair, attempting to keep ahead of the destruction of the wind by stacking it on top of my head _._

“It was a beautiful service.”

A stranglehold on my heart almost made me gasp as his fingers ran down the length of curl after curl, resituating them. It was a transparent attempt to avoid talking.

“Say something?”

“It’s goin’ to rain. Again.” His voice was soft, detached.

“Mmm.” At this, he gave me a faint smile.

“I’m goin’ to go shower, get changed. I need to get outta that house, _mo cridhe_.”

“Then come over afterwards?”  

He nodded, opening the car door for me.

At half seven, Jamie showed up –– rain soaked and still not smelling anything like the man whose bed I shared.  

“Sassenach,” he whispered, fingers slipping along my jaw and lowering his mouth just enough that I could have kissed him had I risen to my tiptoes.  Something in his eyes –– a skittish, glazed look –– made me tentative. I pressed my lips only to the corner of his mouth.  I stayed suspended there for a moment until he turned, bringing the width of his mouth over mine.

A whisper: “Ye ken ye make me warmer.”  

A reciprocal whisper: “You make me warmer, too, Jamie.”

As if by impulse, I touched him. My fingers ghosted over the contours of his cheekbones. His eyes closed and I turned my touch to the line of auburn eyelashes that went almost translucent at the tips.  

When my fingers reached his temples, he said, “I’m in the dark, tryin’ to find light. I canna do it.  There’s nothin’ in me. The hurt is it. I’m lost in it, hiding under a blade of grass.”

My breath caught.  I had nothing to offer, no words.  “Come find me, Jamie.”

His lips found mine again and I dropped my hands from his face to draw his hands to my hips.

“Can ye make me feel real again?” The words felt like he was unfolding himself, exposing the parts of the story written in pencil that had been furiously erased until all that was left was a haze of graphite.

“Yes or I’ll die trying.”  My hands found the back of his neck and drew his mouth down to mine.  The kiss was cool at first and he leaned into it eventually, hips tilting into mine.  Together, we started to rewrite.


End file.
